The Briefing Memo

August 2026 - If you’re new here, welcome to The Briefing Memo, which features the latest insights and updates from The Venture Dept., the friendly former regulators on the cap table. If this newsletter has been forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.

Company Updates

The Venture Dept. has a new portfolio company, Birdai. Birdai Labs operates at the base of the chain, decoding every transaction on high-performance blockchains to build a ground-truth picture of how execution actually happens. It uses that picture to improve execution and return value to the participants who generate order flow, rather than the validators and arbitrage traders who extract it from them.

Portfolio company Circuit has launched Backup Vaults, which allows users to create a non-custodial backup wallet, providing disaster recovery from end to end. It’s these sort of tools that are providing a safer, more secure digital experience for crypto. Always glad to see Circuit making new, helpful stuff. 

Portco Etherfuse has gotten approval from Kazakhstan to issue government Stablebonds. The central Asian country is positioning itself as the settlement layer between China and the West, building tenge-renminbi swap lines, digital currency integration via mBridge and CBETS, a CIPS gateway, and UnionPay interoperability, all while remaining trusted by Beijing, Brussels, and Washington simultaneously. Cross-border corridors like this need high-quality local-currency collateral to settle into, and that's exactly the gap Etherfuse's tokenized sovereign debt is built to fill, positioning the company as the collateral layer for one of the world's most consequential emerging trade corridors. Etherfuse also signed an MOU with Shinhan Bank, South Korea’s largest asset manager, along with the Solana Foundation and Orca on August 21 to build and test a proof-of-concept KRW-denominated tokenized fund on Solana, targeting offshore institutional investors while excluding Korean residents under FX law. The pilot, modeled on BlackRock's BUIDL fund, aims to validate KYC/AML, security, compliance, and liquidity infrastructure ahead of Korea's STO framework taking effect in February 2027.

If you’re a regular Briefing Memo reader, you know we love to talk about Superstate, one of our most successful portcos. If you want to get deep into what Superstate is doing, we suggest you dive into a recent 15-page report from Citi that explains Superstate is “the onchain plumbing for the next generation of regulated financial products.” Superstate is able to defend its position through its regulatory moat and it believes “it positions Superstate’s chain-agnostic, distribution-ubiquitous model as best suited” to be one of the winners. We’re only just a little miffed that Citi didn’t mention The Venture Dept. was an early investor. Superstate also is exploring with Bitwise tokenizing the Solana staking ETF. It will be held onchain at Superstate’s registered-transfer agency, with the tokenized shares carrying the same rights as the traditionally-held instrument.

Dept. Updates

Matt will be featured at a couple upcoming events in and around DC. First, he will be a speaker at Stablecon DC, which will be in early September.

The Amsterdam event in May was really terrific and we recommend you head down there. Then, he’s back on the Acela to speak at the Coindesk Policy & Regulation conference, where he’ll speak about crypto collateral.

The team is starting to line up a trip to Asia this fall. We’d love to meet up when we’re there. Our likely stops are Tokyo and Singapore, so please let us know if you’re going to be around in early November.

Jon spent the first weekend in August at Berkeley for its second annual Agentic AI summit. For those who haven’t been (and I hadn’t been there before), Berkeley is truly beautiful. When someone complains that 78 degrees is “too hot,” you know it’s nice. 

Some of it was over my head. You quants or whatever can tell us what the hell this all means: 

This summit drew some 5,000 people and 100,000 people watching online. (Catch the replay here.) The in-person crowd was mostly engineers (at least at one hand-raising exercise, which I guess makes sense with this whole math thing above), with lots of academics and a smattering of investors. The line at 8:07am (seven minutes after check-in started) was already several hundred people long:

Place was jammed:

Even though folks like us weren’t quite the intended audience for the summit, there were some takeaways with respect to the intersection of agentic and finance. Many financial institutions are embracing AI for what I’m sure they hope are cost savings (read: headcount), but also for how they can supercharge their employees. Companies made presentations on how employees that use AI are what they’re looking for in a good worker. Those that don’t, well… when the company throws out numbers (84% of employees use it), and he’s at an AI conference, and he needs to say FinancialCo. is an AI maxi, I’d hate to be in the 16%. (FWIW, Circle mentioned on its Q2 earnings call that their employee adoption is 86%.) We’d love to hear the adoption rates at your company. Drop us a line with percentages and anecdotes. It was pretty universal across the board that enterprises are hiring AI professionals, with several putting up QR codes for aspiring applicants. Jobs will still be there, they promise, but with a big AI bent.

While not at the conference, BNY announced over a year ago that it had agentic employees, with their own email and Teams accounts, as well as human supervisors. A bank discussed using such agents to speedily organize and egest to the decision making human a fully compiled set of documents and a report by a loan applicant. Eventually those agents will, in one bank’s theory, become managers, telling humans what to do. (Anecdotally, some banks in New York are already doing this.) This is getting serious. 

SF seems all in on AI. Instead of being bombarded with personal injury attorney billboards, like seemingly everywhere else, they were all about AI. So maybe because the West Coast is AI and NY is digital assets, there was little knowledge among the crowd that even knew what stablecoins were, even though Circle was there at a couple sessions mapping out how agents can be connected to stablecoin wallets to make transactions. “So is that ACH?” an attendee asked. “Seems like there’s better uses of AI than finance,” one attendee scoffed. Sure, yes, get on that climate change, Hal (which, hurry up because just one data center in Texas uses somewhere between LA and NY’s energy consumption annually). Let’s solve Alzheimer’s; cure cancer; improve mental health; get doctors in front of patients instead of doing admin. But, this is America. This is Wall Street. It’s the epicenter of capitalism. If I know anything about good ol’ Wall Street capitalism, it’s that if there’s a dollar in it, they’re going to do it. 

In fact, agentic will, and already does, have a place in finance. Agents are able to run KYC checks, conduct institutional order routing, and conduct complex client onboarding and data intake. McKinsey thinks agents will be orchestrating $3-5 trillion in agentic commerce by 2030.  Bots are telling your retail broker what products to sell you - in real time, as you chat on your zoom call. Where will this go? Among other things, I close my eyes and see telling a bot, “Here’s a stablecoin wallet. I want X returns, with Y risk. Come back in six weeks with more money than I gave you.” 

Friend-of-the-fund Rain has launched the Agentic Payments Alliance, alongside prominent names like Visa, Mastercard, Circle, and Solana. Circle envisions an "open agentic economy" where AI agents become a new form of labor — publishable, discoverable, and payable as easily as websites — built on open protocols for identity (ERC-8004), payment (x402 and MPP), and stablecoin settlement rather than owned by any single platform. Most of the foundational infrastructure already exists (identity registries, payment rails, Circle's own 900+ service Agent Marketplace), but the trust and discovery layers remain immature or missing entirely. Circle's H2 2026 roadmap centers on proving out one full transaction loop (a developer publishes a paid agent, an independent buyer agent discovers and pays it, and that transaction feeds reputation data for future discovery), which the company frames as a contribution to an open ecosystem rather than a proprietary platform it intends to control. It’s being built.

Though it’s early (see portco Rhythmic co-founder Aaron Marks giving some insights on that here), there are potential opportunities to invest in agentic and believe investing early in this space should yield good results. Valuations are, quite obviously, high, and valuations continue to be a driving factor in our investment decisions. We are on the lookout for slightly mad, fully driven founders who will give us a slice of equity for a reasonable price who are going to reshape the financial world, including in AI. Let us know.

Regulatory Developments

Yeah, so, so much for CLARITY it would seem. The Senate has bigger fish to fry and Polymarket has the odds down to 15%. Midterms will eat a lot of the rest of the calendar before November. Then we’re in lame duck session. Maybe then? Probably not. Gah! Even Russia passed its own digital assets regulation act. 

Ok, ok, at least we have the SEC, which (finally) formally proposed its Regulation Crypto Assets, its first dedicated offering rulebook for the industry, building on March's interpretive release that sorted tokens into a five-category taxonomy and introduced a "separation" concept for shedding investment-contract status over time. The proposal adds two new capital-raising exemptions, a $5M lightweight path and a $75M disclosure-heavy path, plus a formal safe harbor letting issuers certify their way out of securities treatment once managerial promises are complete, with state-law preemption baked in. It’s also a safe harbor for crypto issuers to get out from the SEC’s purview.

Pitched by Chair Atkins as a bridge rather than a substitute for legislation, it's now open for 60 days of comment,. The CFTC is working on its own rules, too. We will take what we can get.

To talk about all this, Trump had over some of the biggest names in the space. Probably nothing to this, but everyone seems to really love Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi, but not so much Brian Armstrong and Vlad Tenev. 

Probably fake news. 

The SEC gave Franklin Templeton a no-action letter, allowing its ETFs and mutual funds to hold its tokenized MMF, while bypassing the old physical custody rules. This gives the instruments holding the MMF to get hourly NAV calculations, intraday trading, and all the other goodies onchain instruments get you. 

The OCC has told crypto companies that the regulator is open for business and they’re welcome to get a charter. As we’ve discussed, the OCC is issuing charters like we haven’t seen in a generation:

It seems that you can still be denied an OCC charter in this day and age. While it issued several new charters recently, it dinged Wise. Why? For not following the rules! Wise recently became subject to a multi-state consent order for deficiencies in its BSA/AML/CFT programs, with multiple violations of state and federal laws. “[T]he OCC cannot conclude the proposed national trust bank will have an effective AML/CFT compliance program for conducting business in the U.S. until Wise has addressed existing deficiencies and develops an enhanced enterprise-wide AML/CFT program, especially as WNT would be a small aspect of a larger enterprise with a purpose to enable the continued growth and scale of Wise.” Bunq was also dinged, with the OCC saying its management doesn’t have the experience (and is only working at this company part time). Get your compliance act together before you go asking (even this) regulator for a license. 

The FDIC is partnering with major banking and fintech trade groups, including the ABA, ICBA, Bank Policy Institute, Financial Technology Association, and American Fintech Council (and maybe the OCC), to create an independent standard-setting body that would certify whether fintechs and other bank service providers meet federal risk-management guidelines, easing the burden on banks (especially community banks) of vetting the same vendors repeatedly. Participation would be voluntary and wouldn't shield banks from regulatory scrutiny, but the effort aims to give examiners baseline assurance about vendor safety while preserving each bank's own oversight responsibilities. We love the idea of being able to share responsibilities to reduce duplicative, triplicate, quadruplicate, etc. work.

The FDIC approved a deposit insurance application for Augustus National Bank, a newly chartered national bank that will focus on deposit and lending products, virtual currency, payment, and treasury services for digital asset companies, high-net-worth individuals, AI and technology companies, and international financial institutions, and which also plans to issue a stablecoin through a subsidiary. The organizers received a conditional OCC charter, and the FDIC found the bank satisfied the statutory framework's seven factors for approval (including financial condition and capital adequacy). 

Circle went and got itself a DFS limited charter. It already had a Bitlicense and MTL, but they can now act as a fiduciary, providing custody and asset-management services to New Yorkers. You’ll recall Circle got an OCC charter in July, but USDC issuance will run through NY. It’s a badge of honor to get a DFS charter, and probably a good hedge about what might happen when the Administration changes over. As an aside, DFS is doing an admirable job of issuing licenses and charters, we should note - seven in the last year, double the average since 2015. Hat tip.

Stablecoin cards are hitting their stride, hooray: 

Rain and Western Union have launched a stablecoin card in 37 markets, a Visa card that lets folks receive money transfers in USDPT and use it at any Visa merchant or ATM. And Mastercard just dropped $1.8 billion on BVNK to enhance stablecoin payment settlements.

BNY is doing a collab with Galaxy Digital to, among other things, allow its custody clients to stake digital assets. Some of us around here can tell you this is a big win for the Bank (once it finalizes regulatory approval), who’s been trying to get home on this idea for some time. BNY is also bringing its transfer agency business, $8.6 trillion, onchain. Well done, Hamiltonians.

Project Agora is coming to life. Five central banks and 28 major FIs (JPM, Citi, Standard Chartered among them) processed $1mm in transactions across six currencies in a first major test of the cross-border settlement system. Using tokenized central bank reserves and commercial deposits, the institutions share a ledger for quick settlement. 

Did you have on your bingo card that an LAPD officer and FBI agent would be busted for stealing crypto? I mean, Serpico comes to mind here, but I sure didn’t think so, at least not in the same week. A cop in LA was convicted of threatening to kill a 17-year old crypto scammer unless he gave up his storage device with $350k of BTC on it and was sentenced to life plus 15 years. Man. In New York, an FBI agent turned himself in after being racked with guilt for transferring to himself $1mm in crypto held in investigatory targets’ wallets.

Listens and Reads

Did someone say Superstate? Listen to this Policy Protocol ep with former SEC attorney and current Superstate General Counsel Alex Zozos, talking about Clarity and Reg Crypto. Good inside baseball.

Here’s a great podcast with a senior partner at BCG who leads global banking. He says Banks face a real strategic threat from digital assets: BCG estimates up to 15% of revenues and 30% of profits could be at risk by 2035, driven mainly by stablecoins pressuring transaction banking, deposit margins, and forcing banks to maintain both legacy and digital rails. The biggest takeaway is that banks are not being displaced outright, but they do need a strategy now: the strongest opportunities are in asset management, trading, and owning the consumer interface, while waiting too long could leave value to fintechs and crypto-native players. Better get moving, banks.

An IMF blog argues tokenization is far more than a technological upgrade for faster settlement, as processes that today occur sequentially — execution, clearing, settlement — can now happen simultaneously, governed by software rather than institutional processes. The post warns this could shift risk away from traditional balance sheets: risk could migrate away from the balance sheets of institutions such as banks and investment funds towards the companies managing services and market infrastructures, meaning the potential points of failure could change, so the policy frameworks must adapt accordingly, with outcomes hinging on choices around the role of public and private money, the degree of interoperability, legal frameworks, code governance, [and] liquidity backstops. This is a rare instance of a top global financial regulator taking tokenization seriously as a structural shift, offering a genuinely balanced, non-hype framing at a moment when most coverage is either breathless (Wall Street banks racing to tokenize and why) or dismissive. It also connects directly to the deeper IMF policy note behind it, which is unusually blunt about the tradeoffs: traditional financial systems rely on delays like end-of-day settlement and batch processing that give regulators time to intervene before problems spread, and tokenization's removal of those "shock absorbers" means liquidity crises could materialize instantly across borders faster than national regulators can respond.

Good watch about the DTCC’s move to tokenization right here and tokenization’s impact on the future of the markets.

Disclaimer

The information in this newsletter is provided solely for general informational purposes and reflects the author’s personal views at the time of publication. Nothing herein should be construed as investment advice, legal advice, or a recommendation to engage in any transaction or strategy. Readers should consult their own professional advisors before making any financial, legal, or other decisions. All information is provided “as is,” without any representation or warranty of any kind.